Eggplant Plant and Mount Fuji

Eggplant Plant and Mount Fuji is a color woodblock print by Kawabata Gyokushō, dated about 1880-1890, held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (accession RP-P-1961-133) as part of an album of thirty-nine octagonal prints donated to the museum in 1961 by Mrs. L.J. Boddaert of Delft. The print measures 22.3 by 28.7 cm and is set inside an octagonal frame — a format borrowed from late Edo and Meiji decorative prints and album leaves. Its juxtaposition of a humble eggplant plant in the foreground with the iconic silhouette of Mount Fuji in the distance is rooted in a long-standing piece of Japanese folk wisdom: the saying ichi-Fuji, ni-taka, san-nasubi ("first Fuji, second hawk, third eggplant") names the three most auspicious things to see in a New Year's dream, and the pairing of Fuji and an eggplant therefore brings together two of those three lucky images. Gyokushō's treatment combines the Maruyama-school habit of close observation of plants — the leaves, stems, and small purple fruit are drawn with the discipline he learned under Nakajima Raishō — with the symbolic vocabulary of New Year's imagery, producing a print at once decorative, auspicious, and culturally specific. The Rijksmuseum album as a whole is one of the most coherent collections of Gyokushō prints in a European museum.